She snorts out a laugh and curls her feet up under her. “It’s just that a little bird told me he was a late-minute addition to the scholarship program.”
I have no idea where she’s going with this, so just arch an eyebrow and say primly, “You shouldn’t pay so much attention to wildlife.” I slump a little, frowning at the floor. “Would this bird have a name beginning with the letter G?”
“His family did billet him last minute.”
“And what else did he say?”
“Nothing if you’re going to get all defensive.”
I open my mouth to spurt out a whole shield worth of exactly that, then snap it shut before I can dig a bigger hole. “I don’t mean to be, but this is genuinely the first I’m hearing about it.”
“You should communicate with lover-boy more, then.”
“We communicate.”
“Saying ‘there, that’s the spot’ over and over doesn’t count.”
Now more of my face turns red and I’m doubly cursing the horrendous thinness of the boarding room walls.
“Well…” Rowena checks over her shoulder in a sure sign that the gossip is juicy. “Gareth said that he was scouted for a school up in Avondale and everyone thought that’s where he was going to go. Then he turned that into an invitation to Coach Welter to come along to one of his games and lo and behold, he’s suddenly the recipient of an offer to come here instead.”
I make a noncommittal noise. “Isn’t that pretty standard? You use one offer against another until you end up with the one most beneficial.”
“Look at you, queen of sporting scholarships.”
My eyes get their daily exercise of rolling. “It’s a standard business practice. You volunteer at the theatre all the time. Haven’t you seen actors use offers at one play to hook themselves up with a part in another?”
“Well, yeah. But that’s a show business thing.”
I put her in a friendly headlock. “That’s a worldwide, applies to any kind of offer, thing.”
The outside doors bang open and the noise level shoots through the roof. Seb comes inside first, locks eyes with me immediately, then comes over to give me an enormous hug.
“Wow. Did you work up that sweat just for me?” I ask as his clammy body wraps around mine. “Shouldn’t you have a shower first?”
“If you wanted me to shower before hugging you, you should have waited for me in there.”
“We tried,” Rowena interjects, her gaze hugging the arse of another player, Wesley. “Believe me, that’s exactly where we wanted to be.”
“Come on,” Seb says, tossing me over his shoulder like I’m a towel. He holds my legs with one hand while the other swats my butt. “All the sexy ladies in the shower, post-haste.”
“Ooh, can I have one?” Antoine says, raking his gaze over Rowena with the same painful slowness she used on Wesley seconds earlier. “Come with me. I bite far less than Clarkson does.”
“Put me down,” I sputter, hitting at his broad back to absolutely no effect. “This is my best coat.”
“Even better now it’s got eau de Seb all over it.” He grins, putting me down in the middle of a shower cubby, then reaching for the tap while I laugh so hard that my attempts to get free come to absolutely nothing. “But let me clean you off, Princess.”
I escape under his arm, squealing as I run for the exit, grabbing Rowena en route and slamming through the doors to the outer room as my heart pounds like it’s run a marathon instead of the length of the changing rooms.
When I angle towards the outside doors, Rowena grabs me around the waist and tugs me onto the bench to wait. “No getting away that easily. You still haven’t told me your actual history together. I know he didn’t get that glint in his eye from the past few weeks.”
“He did. Anything else is just stuff you’ve made up for your own entertainment.”
She falls silent for a few moments. “Was he with someone else? Is that it? Or were you?”
I cast my glance around the room in full theatrics. “Can someone tell me where to get off this fishing expedition? I’m sure I didn’t sign up for this.”
“If you don’t want me to ask a thousand questions, just answer me honestly.”
